That tiny moment when Sandra Hüller dropped a handkerchief in the theater dressing room – it could conjure up a wonderfully dreamy smile of memory on Simone Bär’s face. It was immediately apparent how much she loved her job as a casting agent, what details she saw that others might not have noticed, and why she was in her profession one of the largest in Germany would.
You have to think of this smile when you hear the sad news that Simone Bär died on Monday, much too early at the age of 57, of cancer. In her small office in West Berlin, the fates of actors were decided, world careers like Daniel Brühl’s began, and international star directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, François Ozon and Stephen Daldry sought advice when their stories were set in Germany and called for German-speaking actors. She also starred in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.
She drove across the country and found the solution in a tiny black and white photo
The anecdote with the handkerchief in particular illustrates how difficult Simone Bär’s work often was and the passion with which she looked for discoveries. The director Hans-Christian Schmid sent her on a quest in 2005 for his film “Requiem”, in which a young woman falls into religious madness and believes she is possessed by demons. The actress should be unknown, a fresh face from acting school and the theatre.
One does not believe that every young face is capable of expressing such archaic religiosity. The search became difficult, Bär drove across the country, poring over programs. And finally came across a tiny black and white photo of Sandra Hüller, who was just playing her first major theater roles in Basel and was not at all pushing into the film business. She had to be asked to send in a video, which then consisted of shaky images of a children’s performance and the moment in the cloakroom when Huller dropped a handkerchief and she spontaneously acted on it.
Hans Christian Schmid freely admits to this daythat he did not see when viewing the video that Simone Bär had discovered long ago. But that only proves why good casting agents are indispensable. Anyway, he auditioned Hüller and cast her. The tremendous impression that his new star made at the Berlinale premiere of “Requiem” was the beginning of a great film and television career.
A few of these stories, which began in Simone Bär’s office, have become known over the years: how Daniel Brühl auditioned for the German sniper in “Inglorious Basterds” and Quentin Tarantino reacted very moved – “I just saw my film in front of me” . Or Tarantino’s first meeting with Christoph Waltz, for the same film, which then became not just a match made in heaven, but almost a brotherhood, which also produced the classic “Django Unchained”.
Simone Bär could have told hundreds of these stories. The list of well-known actors she has discovered is long. “She saw me before I knew I existed” says Vicky Krieps, who is also currently making a world career. The list of directors who wanted to work with her is even longer – Wolfgang Becker, Christian Petzold, Sherry Hormann, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Margarethe von Trotta and so on. She was responsible for television series such as “Babylon Berlin” and “Dark” as well as most recently for “Nothing New in the West”, the German Oscar candidate.
And yet, Simone Bär kept most of these stories to herself. She was a person who deliberately did not seek the limelight, probably also in order not to be constantly bothered by talent tests of young actors who had gone wild. She attributed a certain resistance to her origins, she was born in 1965 in Königs Wusterhausen in Brandenburg.
So it was that she only learned English when her reputation was already spreading around the world and Tarantino was at the door. And it was also why big names and budgets didn’t matter in the slightest if she wasn’t convinced of a cast. It was precisely with this that she won so many hearts forever. “She burned at both ends: for the cause,” says Sherry Hormann. “I will carry them with me in every night-day fall or gliding flight, with eternal gratitude,” writes Vicky Krieps.